go where the viewers are! —

Racing needs new fans—and paywalls and geoblocking aren’t helping

The return of the World Endurance Championship has me annoyed with broadcasting contracts.

Enlarge/ The Toyota TS050 hybrid driven by Sebastien Buemi of Switzerland, Kazuki Nakajima of Japan, and Fernando Alonso of Spain competes during the WEC 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps Race at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps on May 5, 2018 in Spa, Belgium.

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The World Endurance Championship is trying something new. As it transitions to becoming a winter series at the end of 2019, it's running a "Super Season," which got underway at Spa Francorchamps in Belgium on Saturday and finishes with the 2019 24 Hours of Le Mans. But US fans of the WEC might have had a bit of trouble watching the race. After many years on Fox Sports, the series has moved to Velocity, and as part of the deal it has geoblocked its streaming service in North America. It's a retrograde step, locking content away from both existing and potential fans at a time when motorsports of all flavors are struggling for viewers.

It's a topic that has been on my mind quite a lot of late. Partly, that has been driven by the headlines: Formula 1 has a new TV network in the US (ESPN), and in recent weeks we've seen announcements of similar news from IndyCar and the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship (both of which will be exclusive to NBC from 2019). And partly because "the future of racing" was the topic of a panel I moderated at the Future of the Automobile conference, which just took place in Los Angeles. The sport is facing a number of problems, but one of the biggest is a declining audience, and I'm not convinced the deals we're seeing are going to help.

The olden days

Things were much simpler in racing's heyday, back before we had cable TV or Internet streaming. There were fewer competing demands for our time—and certainly fewer opportunities to watch drivers go head to head each weekend. With only a handful of TV channels, if one was showing the Indy 500, then millions of people would happily sit down and watch the show. Then along came specialized channels like the dearly departed Speedvision. Now you could see plenty of racing—as long as you were a subscriber. But the marquee events remained on free-to-air broadcast TV.

Things started to change with F1. In the late 1990s, Bernie Ecclestone launched F1 Digital+, a satellite subscription service available in Europe. F1 Digital+ was a flop, but it pioneered the use of multiple different video feeds and more content than we'd been used to with plain old linear broadcasting. Although F1 couldn't make a go of the service itself, broadcasters like UK-based Sky took the idea and ran with it. Soon, Ecclestone was selling rights packages to these broadcasters for use in pay TV services, although still with some effort to ensure most of the races were still free to watch in some form.

Then we got the Internet, and theoretically a TV aerial or satellite dish was no longer necessary. After all, it shouldn't matter where in the world you are as long as you have an IP address and the stream can find you. That was the hope, but the men in suits signing the deals weren't ready to think about that. Instead, streaming rights were just another box that got ticked as lawyers exchanged paperwork. If (say) NBC wanted the rights to show F1 in the US, then those rights included streaming F1 races over the Internet to US-based viewers, which meant paywalls and geoblocking.

Cord cutters beware

For most of the WEC's existence (the series got started in 2012), this setup made watching the sport relatively easy. The series had a broadcast contract with Fox, but it also offered its own streaming service, either via a webpage or iOS or Android apps. (Plus there was the always excellent and always free Radio Le Mans audio stream.) However, you did have to pay to watch the races via the WEC stream or apps, even though one of the OEMs that raced in the series had offered to sponsor the streams to make them free for viewers.

As the TV-watching landscape shifts with more and more cord-cutters, this seemed to me like a step in the right direction. Viewers didn't need to be beholden to a massive cable bill each month to watch the series. It's something F1's new owners, Liberty Media, appear all too aware of—as the series negotiates new broadcast contracts, it's insisting on the right to offer its own in-house streaming service globally, which debuts later this month. (In some countries like the UK this has to wait for current contracts to expire before the service will be available.)

But the new WEC deal is a step backwards. The series—justifiably—felt that Fox was giving it short shrift, showing most of the races on Fox Sports 2, a channel with such little reach that it barely figured in the ratings. A move to Velocity and Motor Trend promised 65 million eyeballs, but one consequence is that the WEC app is now geoblocked in North America. To make matters worse, it appears we can forget about being able to watch replays, and don't bother looking for the races on the Motor Trend on Demand app; my experience this weekend was, you either watched it live or not at all.

The problem isn't unique to WEC and Velocity. As part of a deal with disinterested title sponsor Verizon, IndyCar has been offering a second-screen experience, but only for subscribers of the aforementioned cellular network. NASCAR did something similar with Sprint until that cell company was replaced by Monster Energy. Fans of Formula E here in the US can find the races on Fox Sports, but often they're tape-delayed by up to a day, and again there's no legal way to watch them live via the Internet.

All of this matters because racing is a sport that most of us engage with via a screen, and again and again racing series are making it harder, not easier, for new fans to find. You only need to attend a couple of races in person to realize the sport is aging out rapidly. If racing wants a robust and healthy future, one thing it needs to do is start putting its races in front of fresh eyes. Consider this fact: almost a million people watched the 2016 Audi 24 Hours of Le Forza, an e-sports race held concurrently with that year's 24 Hours of Le Mans race. By contrast, only about 300,000 US viewers tuned in to the start of that race on Fox, with maybe only 50,000 watching the dramatic conclusion.

So I think it's time to think about the long view. Instead of locking up streams behind paywalls and geoblocks for the sake of a few extra dollars in the near-term, that means embracing free-to-view, YouTube, and the like.

This is absolutely correct. While the racing series was never as popular, perhaps, pay per view all but killed boxing and while cable TV exploded sports popularity, it also siloed it. This is a problem in the internet age, one easily fixed with online offerings, if only they are offered. There are so many options now, if I can't find it, I move on.

The worst part about the WEC thing was that there was nothing about the service not being available in NA when signing up (unless you dug through the news archives) and will accept your payment. And I am being told as of today that a refund is available for those who signed up prior to April 24th.

Count me as one of the people that is not going to pay an expensive cable subscription or special streaming subscription to watch an event that has advertising everywhere you look. Put it on a streaming thing that I can easily access from my TV without jumping through hoops or I won't bother.

I think the opinion expressed in the article is accurate, but it's not the only reason viewership is declining......a lot of this has to do with ludicrous rule changes and point structures that are pervasive throughout motorsports these days. F1 seems to change regulations on a yearly basis to make things more competitive (which almost never has the desired affect), The new "chase" point structure in NASCAR leaves everyone confused as to who is actually leading the season, and MotoGP seems to just pull rules out of hat (wow, this season we're going to run 800 cc four-strokes!).

All of this just leaves viewers confused and bewildered about what they're actually watching (Why does the Corvette in WEC only run a 5.3L when the production model has a 6.2L, whereas the Ford GT can still run the 3.5L EcoBoost even though it's a much more expensive vehicle? Toyota doesn't make a rear-wheel drive Camry with a pushrod V-8, why is it considered a "stock car"?)

This frustrates me to no end. I'd love to watch F1, but it's hard here in the states if you don't subscribe to a channel that carries it. I myself am a cord cutter so I make do with seeing the race highlights on YouTube a day later.

What I find interesting is you can change the name to pretty much ANY motorsport and the article still is accurate. Motorsports across the spectrum are trying to figure out how to reach new audiences, and for the most part, they are instead limiting their reach.

The new F1 service won't come to Canada until 2020 at the earliest because of pre-existing contracts. I will believe it when it arrives...that no other set of men in suits haven't found a way to keep it unavailable.

I found this out with football 30 years ago when I moved. Couldn't watch my college team on Saturday or "my" pro team on Sunday.So, just stopped watching football altogether.Now that they are available I don't care anymore.

I found this out with football 30 years ago when I moved. Couldn't watch my college team on Saturday or "my" pro team on Sunday.So, just stopped watching football altogether.Now that they are available I don't care anymore.

NBA Basketball has been making it harder and harder to follow my local team. It got to a point a few years back that I, for all intents and purposes, stopped watching. As of last year, I didn't even attend a single game, home or otherwise... Yeah, I have watched the odd marquee match up here and there and a couple of playoff games (featuring not-my-team), but even that is only for a few minutes, streaming on my phone, while I'm already in bed about to nod off...

This is absolutely correct. While the racing series was never as popular, perhaps, pay per view all but killed boxing and while cable TV exploded sports popularity, it also siloed it. This is a problem in the internet age, one easily fixed with online offerings, if only they are offered. There are so many options now, if I can't find it, I move on.

It's rather important to note that it's not about viewership as much as it is about money. Once upon a time, perhaps, racing was for the fans. Today, it's basically cock fights between sponsors who invest in it expecting not only the advertising benefits, but monetary benefits of competing as well. Sponsors/makers of race winners use that to sell their stuff, or basically for inter-corporate bragging rights.

I mean, without really getting into the convoluted corporate economics in Speed Racer, the whole point to racing appears to be financial these days.

One could argue about WHO GETS the money, but optimizing it for revenue flow by ignoring the fans who don't directly reward them with their dollars is certainly one way to make more money with fewer eyeballs on the sport.

It's the typical short-term quarterly-statement-focused mentality of the financial world today. If it doesn't make money this quarter, it's got to change. If throwing those fans who aren't literally spending money to view it it under the bus might make more money, they'll give it a try.

The only real question is whether or not they figure out that having a sport only a few deep pockets can afford to view is the best way to kill a sport before or after it's too late to save it.

I recently took a business trip to Canada, and I couldn't watch my HBO GO subscription because it geolocated me to a foreign country.

I paid for the service damnit, I should be able to watch it wherever I damn please.

That's because there may have been Canadians nearby who might have been able to watch the shows. Can't have that. First, you give us in Canada access to HBO, next thing you know we're discovering fire and making the first steps towards stone tools and simple handprints on the walls, and then where will we be? No, no, HBO is doing the right thing by blocking access outside of the US.

This is one of several reasons I'm a big fan of the Blancpain racing series, it's all free to watch on YouTube from the practice sessions to the full race.

It's also a superb race series offering both sprint and endurance races with a longer 24 hour race in Spa which is the racing highlight of the year for me. All the cars are the same gt3 spec even when there's over 60 of them racing together and they're only split by the driver ability from pros down to the amateur cars. There's a wide variety of cars with many different strengths and weaknesses which keeps the endurance races entertaining and they've been innovative with their rules. After issues with safety car restarts they brought in a system to slow down all cars after an incident which slowed the cars down quicker rather than waiting for a safety car and no one wins or loses out as the cars don't bunch up. They've also introduced minimum pit times to stop teams rushing and making mistakes (such as releasing your car straight into the path of another as we saw at that wec or running over your own mechanic as in f1) with the additional bonuses that it evens out the teams a bit and also gives mechanics time to quickly check over the car and avoid stupid retirements.

The series lacks the incredible technical innovation we've seen in the Wec but sadly with the manufacturer p1 field decimated, wec is lacking there too. The gt3's all look and sound fantastic though which makes up for it and the racing is superb.

What? It's about marketing a product, and how old media is doing a horrible job keeping up with the times. Another poster said to substitute any motorsport and it would still ring true. I would venture it's true about almost any live sporting event. I don't care about motorsport, but the article still rings true because I encounter the same/similar issues with /myfavouritesport/. Luckily there is streaming available, but there's still blackouts for national and regional broadcasts requiring a ridiculous cable contract.

I see it as almost a retreading of all the ground the music industry went through in the early mp3 era. Adapt or die.

I recently took a business trip to Canada, and I couldn't watch my HBO GO subscription because it geolocated me to a foreign country.

I paid for the service damnit, I should be able to watch it wherever I damn please.

Except you don't own the service; HBO does, and it decides where you can and can't watch it. You're just renting their service. You have to also consider that exclusivity for the buyer of their content in other countries is typical.

I don't travel anymore due to age and poor health so your situation can never be something I could encounter, but I do occasionally buy movies and TV shows, mostly older ones on disc. Perhaps for similar reasons I'm frustrated when every now and then I can't buy a certain movie or even a TV show in America that is available abroad, when in every case they are American movies and TV shows.

For example, the TV show Columbo is not available on Blu-Ray in America but oddly it is available in of all places in Japan. A strange situation.

The sad part is that it's often easier to find a high-quality illegal stream of my desired sport than it is to watch it legally, and I even have a legit cable account with access to the major sports channels in Canada.

If I want to watch something legally, I need to guess (or remember) which of TSN or Sportsnet it is on, then scroll through their hard-to-use schedule things, and watch it exactly when it airs.

If I want to watch something illegally, I search for reddit/r/f1streams or reddit/r/nflstreams, pick the game I want to watch. Turn adblock to maximum, and usually the top link works fine.

Shoutout to Mother's wax for sponsoring ad-free ESPN F1 coverage, btw. Thanks for bringing at least one North American kicking and screaming into good coverage.

random executive: I'm not seeing the problem. If you multiply the two tracks together, it's obviously an upward trend.

As a Disney shareholder, I DO see the problem, and so do a decent number of my ilk. I don't hold enough shares to make much of a difference on my own, but in aggregate we shareholders have been giving Disney copious amounts of side-eye for a while now over ESPN. The board is well aware that declining subscriber numbers without a very convincing explanation of how those eyeballs are now watching ESPN-provided streaming content instead, is making we investors grumpy. We are well aware that squeezing the people who are left even harder to make up for those leaving is NOT a good strategy, and that streaming is probably the future.

Sadly, we also get grumpy at the thought that sports content in general may not be as valuable as it once was. We did invest in Disney because we thought it had the potential to make us money through growth and dividends, and ESPN was a significant part of that growth and cashflow. In all honesty, we would probably be upset at a plan to simply accept much lower margins on sports content and switch to streaming everything free with ads. While I might love that as a consumer, as an investor it seems foolish to make a big capital investment in a service that will be guaranteed to decrease the monetary value of your content with no guarantee it will reach enough eyeballs to make the decrease worth it. Is that cognitive dissonance? I feel like it is.

I recently took a business trip to Canada, and I couldn't watch my HBO GO subscription because it geolocated me to a foreign country.

I paid for the service damnit, I should be able to watch it wherever I damn please.

Except you don't own the service; HBO does, and it decides where you can and can't watch it. You're just renting their service. You have to also consider that exclusivity for the buyer of their content in other countries is typical.

I don't travel anymore due to age and poor health so your situation can never be something I could encounter, but I do occasionally buy movies and TV shows, mostly older ones on disc. Perhaps for similar reasons I'm frustrated when every now and then I can't buy a certain movie or even a TV show in America that is available abroad, when in every case they are American movies and TV shows.

For example, the TV show Columbo is not available on Blu-Ray in America but oddly it is available in of all places in Japan. A strange situation.

That's like saying when I go into a restaurant, I don't own the food, the restaurant does. No, the restaurant owns the restaurant. Once I pay for the food, then the food is mine. If I want to eat it there or put it in a doggie bag and go home with it, that's my own business.

I don't think many people would be confused into thinking that paying $whatever/month for HBO GO means you own HBO. But you own the service rendered, in this case the right to watch the shows that are on offer. If HBO wants to take GoT off the menu, well that's up to them sure. Then I can decide whether or not it's still worth paying for. But that's another issue entirely.

The audience for motorsports has always been relatively small, and skewed older. They are something that appeals to baby-boomers, who were of the generation that grew up in the heyday of "car culture".

The younger generations don't have the same nostalgia for cars. And the current generation? They barely care about cars at all.

In other words, motorsports aren't that popular for the same reason that horse racing isn't that popular. It's old, it's boring, and people have have better things to do.

I recently took a business trip to Canada, and I couldn't watch my HBO GO subscription because it geolocated me to a foreign country.

I paid for the service damnit, I should be able to watch it wherever I damn please.

Definitely.

Pro Tip: VPN through your home router. Problem solved.

One of the services I've subscribed to claims I'm in a foreign country when at home. I've gotten past it by VPN'ing to my office... 8 miles away on the same ISP /facepalm.

Something like that has happened to me as well, but in my case it was while staying at a hotel that had an international presence and happened to route their in-room Internet service through their home office ISP in a foreign country. For most things, it wasn't a problem. But it set off I-forget-what-service's geofence.

In that particular case, tethering my phone worked. Now, I would probably do the VPN.

The audience for motorsports has always been relatively small, and skewed older. They are something that appeals to baby-boomers, who were of the generation that grew up in the heyday of "car culture".

The younger generations don't have the same nostalgia for cars. And the current generation? They barely care about cars at all.

In other words, motorsports aren't that popular for the same reason that horse racing isn't that popular. It's old, it's boring, and people have have better things to do.

The audience for motorsports has always been relatively small, and skewed older. They are something that appeals to baby-boomers, who were of the generation that grew up in the heyday of "car culture".

The younger generations don't have the same nostalgia for cars. And the current generation? They barely care about cars at all.

Gotta disagree with you there. As an adult who can't drive and doesn't have any plan to learn in the next 4 years who's deeply ambivalent about cars, I still found last years 24 hr of Nurburgring incredibly engaging. The insane finish sure helped, but watching the engineers and drivers struggle to keep cars on the track for such a long period of time was compelling. It reminds me of the drama that you get in high-school robotics tournaments.

The audience for motorsports has always been relatively small, and skewed older. They are something that appeals to baby-boomers, who were of the generation that grew up in the heyday of "car culture".

The younger generations don't have the same nostalgia for cars. And the current generation? They barely care about cars at all.

In other words, motorsports aren't that popular for the same reason that horse racing isn't that popular. It's old, it's boring, and people have have better things to do.

Except the article tells you that 10 times more people watch a video game race than a real race. Obviously there is interest in watching some iinds of racing